too
late, having come from south to north,
on
the way back. Past the window lattice
smoke sputters and the stone
house

catches
fire, like a pale yellow mirage in a fruitful field
honored

on
special days by the calm. From the outer wall

amidst
marketplace junk, there's less coal than eyes

winding
up walls from the Sunday crowd

where
ears of harmsir* grow amidst the yellow.

It
was not the river that flowed,

but
the things reflected in it that rippled in cadence,

and
clocks and clouds took off upstream, as if

you
were heading for the wide water

amidst
whirling park wasps and women, when

the
bilious awn bowed before the bazaar fire pit, and

to
your father's unclean shadow. The picture
pelted backwards, into
the thick

of
the quiet emulsion. Wind and waves.

_________

*
a kind of grain

Week's End

Bridge, horizon, or wall in the distance – it's not important.
We, thank God,
are banished from the city – if only for a time; a serious step.
But as before, we're so helpless
we can't worship nature, so instead we worship
the Personlessness in which we abide
this entire waning day. And neither by prayer, nor frenzied
naivete, nor fleeting artlessness
can anyone be saved
who boasts of too useless an anonymity,
having chosen impassable roads. We survey the world,
for now unfamiliar – and because of this we seem to see
nothing at all (or has the thing seen
deprived us of our sight?). The glade,
the reservoir, the pellet, the mulberry, and the wagon,
overswept with weeds, and suddenly, –
God knows from where she came – a churchgoer
who
adjures us: "Silence."
And right away: a click of the Spidola*,
where, a moment ago, were muttering voices,
women and men in various languages,
making it seem we had an archetypal
audio map of the world, – a sign offered
to the Sunday silence. We turned the noise off.
A lone breeze rustled an old piece of straw
and vanished in the colorless air. Nettles
swayed below and lay down – under them
a small oval of earth was exposed, like a wound,
and in an instant it was hidden again and overgrown by the grass:
windlessness, no sound. I held my breath.
You touched, as per a script, my breast
with your palm. Then, like inevitability,
a girl walked along the low hill (limping!)
and froze at the end of the glade, as if the silence
had already foretold the childish figure on this spot
or had sent her ahead to meet us.

How can all this be saved? For whom are you waiting?
__________* A brand name Lithuanian radio manufactured in the 1960s.

A Propos of a Greek Photograph

Sea, insect, horse. To gaze,torturing the eyes. Flieswere minted along the center – snuffed air. Stone,a small mainspring, worm under hand –untouched earthly trifle. Hefell asleep in Belaqua's pose; neither alivenor dead. A tear,as if a needle, catches the elusive swelling of lipson a scorched face. Without a cryhe opened his eyes – or rather, they themselves,for his lack of concern, surfaced from his lids. An unseeable
essencestared through the millenniumat the road sign. In the end,not stirring, he licks drops from his lipsand feels the aftertaste of melancholy –in God's right hand, in a dead tavern, in someone else's bed.

Week's End, Film

Landscape: like a gift. The spirit streamspast domestic twilight (Dreyerforged whiteness above the northerly mold –this take is for redemption, the Irishmonk said and plunged into the waterwhere the mud sloped downward and at foggy midday the depth steamedabove a distant drowning victim). So flowsthe Comforter.Livestock eat something like communion wafersbut the sun drives dogs and gray window panes out of their mind in the neighboring yard. Friends, hands dancing in
a summer cafe.Onlythe concrete has a name. The river, rising, enduresthe phosphorescence of workers' quadrants; nowhere.And behind the house dust careensin a granular prism: the localdead end will scarcely dry out. We go still furthertalking under our breath orhumming "The Salsbury." Not
chaos,but controlled chaos, like a river whose currentraises the dead in vain:fish, suicides. The ancient raystreams from one street into another. Longshadows descended into the cool room from southernroofs: opposite. A momentconsists of a thousand dark leeches,its facet work lengthens.Sunday dust is all in our eyes.

Week's End: Walk with a Friend

So they walked, out onto the hilly vista – so broad thatthe worn path became more visible, while the frayed curveof the fence with its pungent-green, mossy coveringand the dirty gust of wind, arising from the dead endto overtake us, as it always does, from behind,worked together, deafening the epic decor, like Paris,as first seen through the eyes of Rousseauin all its fat, cackling lackluster.Compressed by creeping dust and shaggy sprouts ofshrubsthe cheap expanse is exactly here.We slow our step, infected by the silence. EverywhereIt breathes. A Something.A comforting duration, a blazing sun, beetles shift heavily like sullen pilgrims on the stubbleto expose – each time suddenly – while burstinginto flight, their pale, very pale-rose wings.You think we'll be saved this way,constantly
holding our own, like "them." I'm
stuffedto the gills with the feigned ordinariness of summer'sexpanse.We lie, having spread our arms on the trampled field –two crossesfrom a bird's eye view; I grope a young reed, clutching at evasive fragility with my nail; and youread about how Rimbaud died (is dying):words,
prompted by pain, – "allah
karim"but the angel is already up for grabs (everySunday.)